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Earlier this year, Nextel Communications decided to open a new customer call center in Seattle and asked Ed Janes, director of Nextel's IT operations, to hire the center's IT team. But there was a catch; Janes lives in Atlanta. So instead of taking multiple trips to Seattle and conducting many rounds of live interviews (which would mean paying for plane flights and hotel rooms), Janes turned to Directfit, a site dedicated to helping businesses find IT workers. He used the site's video interview service to watch prerecorded online videos of several job candidates. Janes then whittled his list of candidates down to three or four and flew to Seattle when hiring time came around. "This not only saved travel expenses," says Janes, "but significant travel time as well."

Though high-speed Internet access is much more prevalent in the office than at home, most of today's broadband applications target consumers. According to research firm Cahners InStat Group, 92 percent of businesses with at least 1,000 employees access the Internet through broadband connections (T1, T3, DSL, cable, ATM, frame-relay, or faster lines).

By contrast, 82 percent of the Internet's home users still rely on modems. Ironically, the applications that are ideal for a broadband connectionmusic services like Morpheus, photo-sharing services like Kodak's Ofoto, news and sports broadcasts, and online gamesare typically meant for home users.

There are valid reasons for broadband Internet applications not yet becoming a mainstay in the corporate world. Although offices may connect to the Internet through high-speed lines, employees still may not have the bandwidth they need to use broadband applications. Many people still rely on modems when they're at home or on the road. And often, internal corporate networks are too busy dealing with other tasks, such as file sharing, printing, e-mail, and regular Web access, to handle further drains on their resources.

Josh Bersinvice president of product management at DigitalThink, a company that produces online training courses says that many of his corporate customers prefer not to use streaming video. "IT departments say they have too much traffic on their networks, and they don't want a bunch of video thrown on there too," he says. In fact, the corporate network at Nextel's offices in Atlanta is off-limits to any video streaming to prevent network congestion.

Even when a company has plenty of room on its corporate network and employees have DSL and cable connections in their homes, the public Internet can't provide adequate performance for the most useful broadband business applicationvideoconferencing. According to Wainhouse Research, over 80 percent of videoconferencing is still done via private ISDN lines; most of the remaining videoconferencing is done via private IP networks. "Business videoconferencing tends to stay away from the public Internet," says Elliot Gold, an analyst with TeleSpan.

With that in mind, it is possible to conduct low-quality videoconferences over the public Internet. Occasionally, businesses use Internet videoconferencing services designed for consumerssuch as First Virtual Communications' CUseeMe World or Reality Fusion's SeeSaw. And Reality Fusion recently introduced a videoconferencing service called SeeSaw Distance Meeting, which is designed for the public Internet.

This summer, think3, a mechanical design software developer, started using Distance Meeting to connect its California staff with employees as far away as France, Italy, and India. Companies can also run low-quality videoconferencing via Web conferencing services, such as Raindance and its chief competitor, WebEx. Such services, however, are rarely used for that purpose. "We don't think the Internet is ready for prime-time, two-way voice and video communications," says Raindance's Berberian. Even if you're satisfied with the video feeds Raindance provides, it doesn't transmit sound; voices must be transmitted over a telephone.

Although few companies are using the Internet for high-end videoconferencing, they are beginning to use less demanding broadband software. Raindance and WebEx aren't meant for true two-way video, but they let businesses share other types of dynamic software. Some companies use streaming audio and video as part of e-learning applications, such as DigitalThink and SmartForce. But the best example may be Directfit.

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